HackFwd is a pre-seed investment company in Europe. Their blueprint…

Book Title: Start with WHY – How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
Author: Simon Sinek
Year written/published: 2009
Book Source: Amazon
Some extracts:

When the world is flat…

So for the most part they stayed put. It wasn’t until that minor details was revealed – the world is round – that behaviors changed on a massive scale. Upon this discovery, societies began to traverse the planet. Trade routes were established; spices were traded. new ideas, like mathematics, were shared between societies which unleashed all kinds of innovations and advancements. The correction of a simple false assumption moved the human race forward.

Types of Manipulations:

1. Price
2. Promotions
3. Fear
4. Aspirations
5. Peer Pressure
6. Novelty (aka Innovation)

Novelty…

Colgate’s sales started to slip. So the company introduced a new product that included a new feature, the addition of fluoride, perhaps. Then another. Then another…. Each innovation certainly helped boost sales, for a while at least. And so the cycle continued. Guess how many different types of toothpaste Colgate has for you to choose from today? 32… And given how each company responds to the “innovation” of the other, that means Colgate’s competitors also sell a similar number of variants that offer about the same quality… Once again this is an example of the newest set of shiny objects designed to encourage a trial or a purcahse. What companies cleverly disguised as “innovation” is in fact a novelty.

it’s worth repeating…

People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it

Apple and Creative

Apple did not invest the mp3, nor sis they invest the technology that became the iPod, yet they are credited with transforming the music industry. The multigigabyte portable hard drive music player was actually invested by Creative Technologies, a Singapore based technology company that rose to prominence by making the sound blaster audio technology that enables home PCs to have sound. … In fact, Apple didn’t introduce the iPod until 22 months after Creative’s entry into the market. This detail alone calls into question the assumption of a first mover’s advantage. The problem was they advertised their product as Apple’s “1000 songs in your pocket”. The difference is creative told us WHAT their product was and Apple told us WHY we needed it.

Rational vs Limbic brain…

When you force people to make decisions with only the rational part of their brain, they almost invariably end up “over-thinking”. These rational decisions tend to take longer to make, says Restak, and can often be of lower quality. In contrast, decisions made with the limbic brain, gut decisions, tend to be faster, higher quality decisions… The more time spent thinking about the answer, the bigger the risk that it may be the wrong one. Our limbic brain are smart and often know the right thing to do.

Too much info…

Rarely do we sift through all the available information to ensure we know every fact. And we don’t need to. It is all about degrees of certainty. “I can make a decision with 30% of the information,” said former secretary of state COlin Powell. “Anything more than 80% is too much.”

Clarity of WHY:

Ot all starts with clarity. You have to know WHY you do WHAT you do. If people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it, so it follows that if you don’t know WHY you do WHAT you do, how will anyone else?

Doing Business…

The goal of business should not be to do business with anyone who simply wants what you have. If should be to focus on the people who believe what you believe. When we are selective about doing business only with those who believe in our WHY, trust emerges.

Employees first…

… a heretic for positing the notion that it is a company’s responsibility to look after the employees first. Happy employees ensure happy customers, he said. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders – in that order.

Human Matrix…

No one likes to loose, and most healthy people love their life to win. The only variation is the score we use. For some it’s money, for others its fame or awards. For some it’s power, love, a family or spiritual fulfillment…. The drive to win is not, per se, a bad thing. Problems arise, however, when the metric becomes the only measure of success, when what you achieve is no longer tied to WHY you set out to achieve it in the first place.

Competition…

Companies with a clear sense of WHY tend to ignore their competition, whereas those with a fuzzy sense of WHY are obsessed with what others are doing.

Tipping point…

The farther right you go on the curve, the more you will encounter the clients and customers who may need what you have, but don’t necessarily believe what you believe. As clients, they are the ones for whom, no matter how hard you work, it’s never enough. Everything usually boils down to price with them. They are rarely loyal. They rarely give referrals and sometimes you may even wonder out loud why you still do business with them… The goal of business them should not be to simply sell to anyone who wants what you have – the majority – but rather to find people who believe what you believe… Get enough of the people on the left side of the crve on your side and they encourage the rest to follow.

Image Credit

Energy versus Charisma…

Energy motivates but charisma inspired. Energy is easy to see, easy to measure and easy to copy. Charisma is hard to define, near impossible to measure and too elusive to copy… Charisma has nothing to do with energy; it comes form a clarity of WHY. it comes form absolute conviction in an ideal bigger than oneself. Energy, in contrast, comes from a good night’s sleep or lots of caffeine. Energy can excite. But only charisma can inspire.

Most people in the world are the HOW-types..

Most people are quite functional in the real world and can do their jobs and do very well. Some may be very successful and even make millions of dollars, but they will never build billion-dollar businesses or change the world.

Small vs Big companies…

When a company is small, this is not an issue because the founder has plenty of direct contact with the outside world. Trusted HOW-Types maybe in short supply and the founder opts to make a majority of the big decisions. The founder or leader actually goes our and talks to customers, sells the product and hires most if not all the employees. As the company grows, however, systems and processes are added and other people will join… When a company is small, it revolves around the personality of the founder. There is not debate that the founder’s personality is the personality of the company… As a company grows, the CEO’s job is to personify the WHY. To ooze of it. To talk about it. To preach it.

personal success…

… some people, while in pursuit of success, simply mistake WHAT they achieve as the final destination. This is the reason they never feel satisfied no matter how big their yacht is, no matter how much they achieve. The false assumption we often make is that if we simply achieve more, the feeling of success will follow. But it rarely does.

Here’s a gem to start off the week. These are the “Paradoxical Commandments of Leadership,” by Kent Keith (source):

1. People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway.
2. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway.
3. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.
4. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.
5. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.
6. The biggest men with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men with the smallest minds. Think big anyway.
7. People favor underdogs, but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
8. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.
9. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway.
10. Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway.

Excellent read by any student, I would say:

“I saw a lot of idealistic young people go out into the world to do what they thought was right, and good, and true, only to come back a short time later, discouraged, or embittered, because they got negative feedback, or nobody appreciated them, or they failed to get the results they had hoped for.” recalls Keith. “I told them that if they were going to change the world, they had to really love people, and if they did, that love would sustain them. I also told them that they couldn’t be in it for fame or glory. I said that if they did what was right and good and true, they would find meaning and satisfaction, and that meaning and satisfaction would be enough. If they had the meaning, they didn’t need the glory.”

Fantastic list… from Venture Beat…

1. Things take longer than you ever imagine
2. Items that do succeed tend to do so quickly
3. People will let you down
4. Good employees are really hard to find – A solid worker
5. Your bad employees rarely quit
6. You will be lucky and unlucky
7. Avoid the myth and misery of sunk cost
8. Fill the pipe, always fill the pipe

10 Lessons learnt from startup from Finland:

1. Be contagious
2. Focus on a Vision
3. Stop Thinking – Deliver
4. Step Up to Your Role
5. Build a Great Team
6. Learn to Listen; Learn to Fail
7. Pitch With Passion
8. Don’t Seek Funding (Yet)
9. Do Your Homework
10. Be Visible

Looks fun Social Media Monopoly

Book Title: Delivering – A Path To Profits, Passion, and Purpose
Author: Tony Hsieh
Year written/published: 2010
Book Source: Amazon
Some extracts:

on asian culture…

The accomplishments of the children were the trophies that many parents defined their own success and status by. We were the ultimate scorecard. There were 3 categories of accomplishments that mattered to the Asian parents. Category 1 was the academic accomplishments… Category 2 was career accomplishment: Becoming a medical doctor or getting a PhD was seen as the ultimate accomplishment… Category 3 was musical instrument mastery.

The focus after graduation…

As the end of my senior year in college approached, Sanjay introduce me to this thing called the World Wide Web. I thought t was a pretty interesting and fun thing to explore at the time, but i didn’t pay too much attention to it. The focus for most seniors, including myself, was trying to get a job lined up before graduation… Many of our roommates applied for banking or management consulting jobs, both of which were considered the “hot” jobs to get. TO me, both seems incredibly boring and I also heard that the workdays were 16 hours long…. I wanted a job that paid well and didn’t seem like too much work.

ready for an adventure…

But we wanted to run our business and be in control of our own destiny, This wasn’t about the money, it was about not being bored. Both Sanjay and I had now officially resigned, and we were ready to begin the next chapter of our lives. We had no idea where it would lead us, but wherever it was, we knew it had to be better than feeling bored and unfulfilled. We were ready for an adventure.

hiring at LinkExchange…

The good news was that the people we hired were smart and motivated. The bad news was that many of them were motivated by the prospect of either making a lot of money or building their careers and resumes. They wanted to put a few years of hard work into LinkExchange and then move on to their next resume building job at another company.

money and people…

Large amount of money have a strange way of getting people’s true colours to come out. I observed the greed of certain people who had joined the company right before the acquisition trying to negotiate side contracts for themselves at the risk and expense of everyone else in the company….

Making a list of happiest periods…

I made a list of the happiest periods in my life and I realised that one of them involved money. I realized that building stuff and being creative and inventive made me happy. Connecting with a friend and talking through the entire night until the sun rose made me happy. Trick-or treating in middle school with a group of my closest friends made me happy. … I thought about how easily we are all brainwashed by our society and culture to stop thinking and just assume by default that more money equals more success and happiness, when ultimately happiness is really just about enjoying life….. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it was a turning point for me in my life. I had decided to stop chasing the money and start chasing the passion.

Excerpt from Ivanka Trump’s book:

So my advice is to stop trying to “network” in the traditional business sense, and instead just try to build up the number and depth of your friendship, where the friendship itself is its own reward. The more diverse your set of friendships are, the more likely you will derive both personal and business benefits form our friendships later down the road.

Outsourcing and business…

We told the people at eLogistics that we had opened up on our own warehouse because we weren’t happy with the service levels we were getting from them. …. Every week, if WHISKY outperformed eLogistics, then we would take 10000 pairs of shows out of eLogistics and move them over to the WHISKY warehouse. The people at eLogistics weren’t very happy about our plan, but it was hard for them to argue against the logic of it. … it was a valuable lesson. We learned that we should never outsource our core competency.

great companies…

Good to Great by Kim Collins… He talks about what separates the great companies form just good ones over the long term. One of the things that he found form his research was that great companies have a greater purpose and bigger vision beyond just making money or being number one in a market. A lot of companies fall into the trap of just focusing on making money, and then they never become a great company.

inside out…

Now that we were in Vegas with nobody else to learn on except each other, culture became our number one priority, even more important than customer service. We thought that if we got the culture right, the building our brand to be about the very best customer service would happen naturally on its own.

Zappos culture book…

The original idea was simple. We would ask employees to write, in a few paragraphs, the answer to the question: What does Zappos culture mean to you? Except for correcting typos, we would leave it unedited and publish everything in a book. Completely uneditted? THat’s crazy!… For Zappos, it was a risk worth taking… In an age of transparency when twitter can contribute to a company’s success or its downfall, is there anything more compelling than exposing your company’s DNA to the world?

MCQ for logins…

In most companies, logging in to the computer systems requires a login and password. At Zappos, an additional step is required: a photo of a randomly selected employee is displayed and the user is given a multiple-choice test to name that employee.

visiting Zappos…

One of the great advantages of focusing on culture is when repoertes come and visit our offices. Unlike most companies, we don’t give reporters a smal list of people they’re allowed to talk to. Instead we encorage them to wander around and talk to whoever they want.

3 basic rules for public:

1. Be passionate
2. Tell personal stories
3. Be real

10 questions to ask when looking for investors and board members:

1. Do you really need investors? Can you avoid funding by growing more slowly?
2. How actively involved will your investors be How actively involved do you want your investors to be?
3. What value beyond money can your investors add (connections, advice, experience)?
4. What is the time horizon for a financial exit that your investors are expecting?
5. What if anything, are your investors hoping to get out of their involvement beyond just financial return? How would they prioritize those things?
6. Do your investors and board directors buy into the vision and mission of the company?
7. Would they accept less profits if it meant that the vision could be fulfilled faster?
8. How flexible are your investors and board members in their thinking?
9. Who controls the investor? Who controls the board?
10. Do the core values of your investors and board members match the core values of your company?

Happiness Framework 3:

1. Please
2. Passion
3. Purpose

What I find interesting is that many people go through life chasing after the pleasure type of happiness, thinking that once they are able to sustain that, then they will worry about the passion and, if they get around to it, look for their higher purpose.

Another productivity hack is the tomato technique aka pomodoro technique.

Here are some cool resources i found:

1. iPhone app
2. free e-book
3. browser timer

Book Title: Strategy: A View From The Top (An Executive Perspective)
Author: John A. Pearce, Cornelis A. De Kluyver
Year written/published: 2006
Book Source: Amazon
My Comments: I would recommend anybody who wants an introduction to strategy to read this book. I especially loved the thorough explanation of different frameworks of strategy.
Some extracts:

Kocourek, Burger, Birchard propose 12 questions boards should ask in the course of discharging their oversigh responsibilities:

1. Does the management have a comprehensive strategy and operating plan for the company to realize its performance potential? (Strategic direction)
2. Are the necessary human, financial, physical and other supporting resources provided and properly allocated to achieve success? (Resource allocation)
3. Does the CEO provide the leadership required by the company and does the organisation have a succession plan for this position? (Management)
4. Does the management use an effective system of key performance indicators to monitor and control operation performance? (Operating Controls)
5. … …

Methods to speed up ( as a competitive advantage)

1. Streamlining operation
2. upgrading technology
3. forming partnerships

Fundamentally, 6 mandates drive innovation at 3M:

1. Support innovation from R&D to customer sales and support
2. Understand the future by trying to anticipate and analyse future trends
3. Establish stretch goals
4. Empower employees to meet goals
5. Support broad networking across the company
6. recognize and reward innovative people

Book Title: Never Eat Alone – And other secrets to success one relationship at a time

on getting far:

To achieve your goals in life, I realized, it matters less how smart you are, how much innate talent you’re born with, or even, most eyeopening to me, where you came from and how much you started out with. Sure all these are important, but they mean little if you don’t understand one thing: You can’t get there alone. In fact, you can’t get very far at all.

getting info:

There are two aspects to getting good information. One part comes from within you; the other part comes from those around you.

on people:

Our strength comes from what we do and know cumulatively. The fact is, no one gets ahead in this world without a lot of help. Eliminating things like intimidation and manipulation, there is only one way to get anybody to do anything. Do you know what it is?
This is far from a trivial question. Business is, after all, the ability to motivate a group of individuals to move an idea from concept to reality; to take a theory and make it a practice; to gain the buy-in of your employees and colleagues; to encourage others to execute your plans.